7 ms·

> The speed at which AlphaStar overtook previous AIs seems to me to be nearly unprecedented in AI research. Is it not simply the case that, before AlphaStar, v

by baddox 7y ago

> The speed at which AlphaStar overtook previous AIs seems to me to be nearly unprecedented in AI research. Is it not simply the case that, before AlphaStar, very little money and effort was being put into developing AIs for Starcraft 2?

minblaster 7y ago
Starcraft is an incredibly complex game. 10^26 possible moves at any point (you can click/drag anywhere on the screen, pressing a keyboard button as you do so), imperfect information, real-time constraints, etc.
- nuclx 7y ago
  Yes it is, but you can prune the decision space significantly by discarding bogus choices, or more concretely by modelling higher level goals and then compiling them into actual moves.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  That pales in comparison to starcraft at a higher resolution, which has even more points to click on screen! And even that is nothing compared to playing horseshoes in the physical world. There are an infinite number of moves at any given moment! And an infinite number of moments! Horseshoes is clearly the most complex game of all.
  - gpm 7y ago
    Plank would like to say something to you about lengths. Which is why the most complex game of all is actually intergalactic horseshoes.
- 300bps 7y ago
  Starcraft is an incredibly complex game. Even basic strategies will win if they’re done faster. APM (actions per minute) is a very significant factor into who is winning. Apparently they limited their AI player to 264 APM but that’s still incredibly high and done with machine level consistency. That’s almost 4.5 actions per second!! I know there are human level players at and probably above that level but that really allows for basic strategies to win out.
  - tryptophan 7y ago
    And the bot also can parse the entire screen in .03 seconds and then jump to a new area of the map. No human can monitor the entire map like the bot can.
    - bkemmer 7y ago
      But when the machines start competing with humans it should be fair?
    - empath75 7y ago
      Sometimes these critiques seem to be complaining that the ai is too intelligent. That’s sort of the point isn’t it.
    - baddox 7y ago
      If they want to model the constraints of humans, they probably need to create some “attention” system where the AI needs to choose where to invest its finite attention resources. For example, the AI could choose to focus more on the minimap, which would give them higher reaction times to move around the map, but would reduce their reaction times for things on the main screen. A great example would be seeing the faint image of cloaked units. How does that work with the AI? Can the just phrase the current screen and instantly see any cloaked unit? I can imagine an attention system where more attention dedicated to part of the screen would increase the probability of noticing a cloaked unit there.
  - pps 7y ago
    264 is not that high. People (if Serral is not a cyborg) can achieve even 1000 APM; and ~300 EPM average for a game.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      Those aren't meaningful actions, though, are they? That's 17 actions a second.
      - 7y ago
gwern 7y ago
That depends on what you consider 'very little'. SC has had annual computer tournaments and research was published on it routinely. Few computer games see nearly as much money and effort put into developing AIs for them, yet the curve of progress was not exactly impressive.
- baddox 7y ago
  Well, I don’t have any idea of absolute amounts of money, but I’d be more interested in relative amounts of money before and after DeepMind.
interblag 7y ago
There's definitely some truth to that. But looking back on arXiv there are papers going back years, including from Harvard/UofT [1], Tencent [2], Facebook [3], etc. There has also been an SC1 tournament running since at least 2011 [4] I'm sure that the AlphaStar effort absolutely dwarfed everything that came before in terms of investment (as I'm sure AlphaGo did for Go as well) but based on my reading I'd also bet that Starcraft has likely seen the most continued AI research effort of any imperfect information, real-time game over the last decade - I think that's also part of what made it appealing for DeepMind over Dota 2 or any of the other options in this class of game. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.02682.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.02682.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.09467.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.09467.pdf [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.12266.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.12266.pdf [4] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/SSCAIT https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/SSCAIT
Mirioron 7y ago
What makes this amazing isn't specific to StarCraft 2. AI in strategy games has been really lackluster. I can't think of a single example of a strategy game where an AI was competitive against experienced players due to strategy and tactics, rather than inhuman speed, accuracy or cheating. So it's not just about AI in StarCraft 2, but rather AI in essentially any (strategy) game. Now we have an example of an AI that can compete with real players.
- skybrian 7y ago
  There is a genuine advance here, but keep in mind that when an AI is developed by the game developers, they're not necessarily playing to win, but to make the AI fun to beat, and without using too much computer power, which would make the game slower. Also, due to commercial pressures it's tough to put a lot of effort into the AI for a game that's still being changed to make it more fun. Even now, I wouldn't really expect to see most game developers start using the latest machine learning techniques to build their own AI's. Maybe the really successful games with competitive leagues might be interested?
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    >There is a genuine advance here, but keep in mind that when an AI is developed by the game developers, they're not necessarily playing to win, but to make the AI fun to beat, and without using too much computer power, which would make the game slower. This point is being brought up a lot, but I don't really buy it. Yes, there have been instances where the AI being too good discouraged players from playing the game as much, but this almost always happens due to the AI having some inhuman advantage that a person could not really replicate. I think players do want the AI to pose a challenge - that's what a lot of casual PvP games are about. Humans are (were?) the only ones that could offer a fair match against another human. I will absolutely grant you the computational power point though. However, as hardware advances, this cost will become more and more acceptable. I don't expect to see widedspread adoption of this in commercial games within a decade, but I think that in 2 or 3 decades this will be the norm. In fact, I would bet that once we can make an AI that is good at a game, we can also make it weaker. A game could estimate a player's skill rating silently and then adjust the AI's strength to give the player a difficult/fun time. Of course, it could just be that AlphaStar is able to play well against humans, because players treat it like a human. Maybe the AI still has standard game AI-like weaknesses that can be exploited if people know that they're playing against an AI. Eg some Diamond league player went mass ravens and kicked AlphaStar's ass. The AI would have to learn how to deal with stuff like this on the fly and I don't think we're there yet.

by baddox 7y ago

minblaster 7y ago

Starcraft is an incredibly complex game. 10^26 possible moves at any point (you can click/drag anywhere on the screen, pressing a keyboard button as you do so), imperfect information, real-time constraints, etc.

nuclx 7y ago
Yes it is, but you can prune the decision space significantly by discarding bogus choices, or more concretely by modelling higher level goals and then compiling them into actual moves.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
That pales in comparison to starcraft at a higher resolution, which has even more points to click on screen! And even that is nothing compared to playing horseshoes in the physical world. There are an infinite number of moves at any given moment! And an infinite number of moments! Horseshoes is clearly the most complex game of all.
- gpm 7y ago
  Plank would like to say something to you about lengths. Which is why the most complex game of all is actually intergalactic horseshoes.
300bps 7y ago
Starcraft is an incredibly complex game. Even basic strategies will win if they’re done faster. APM (actions per minute) is a very significant factor into who is winning. Apparently they limited their AI player to 264 APM but that’s still incredibly high and done with machine level consistency. That’s almost 4.5 actions per second!! I know there are human level players at and probably above that level but that really allows for basic strategies to win out.
- tryptophan 7y ago
  And the bot also can parse the entire screen in .03 seconds and then jump to a new area of the map. No human can monitor the entire map like the bot can.
  - bkemmer 7y ago
    But when the machines start competing with humans it should be fair?
  - empath75 7y ago
    Sometimes these critiques seem to be complaining that the ai is too intelligent. That’s sort of the point isn’t it.
  - baddox 7y ago
    If they want to model the constraints of humans, they probably need to create some “attention” system where the AI needs to choose where to invest its finite attention resources. For example, the AI could choose to focus more on the minimap, which would give them higher reaction times to move around the map, but would reduce their reaction times for things on the main screen. A great example would be seeing the faint image of cloaked units. How does that work with the AI? Can the just phrase the current screen and instantly see any cloaked unit? I can imagine an attention system where more attention dedicated to part of the screen would increase the probability of noticing a cloaked unit there.
- pps 7y ago
  264 is not that high. People (if Serral is not a cyborg) can achieve even 1000 APM; and ~300 EPM average for a game.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    Those aren't meaningful actions, though, are they? That's 17 actions a second.
    - 7y ago

gwern 7y ago

That depends on what you consider 'very little'. SC has had annual computer tournaments and research was published on it routinely. Few computer games see nearly as much money and effort put into developing AIs for them, yet the curve of progress was not exactly impressive.

baddox 7y ago
Well, I don’t have any idea of absolute amounts of money, but I’d be more interested in relative amounts of money before and after DeepMind.

interblag 7y ago

There's definitely some truth to that. But looking back on arXiv there are papers going back years, including from Harvard/UofT [1], Tencent [2], Facebook [3], etc. There has also been an SC1 tournament running since at least 2011 [4] I'm sure that the AlphaStar effort absolutely dwarfed everything that came before in terms of investment (as I'm sure AlphaGo did for Go as well) but based on my reading I'd also bet that Starcraft has likely seen the most continued AI research effort of any imperfect information, real-time game over the last decade - I think that's also part of what made it appealing for DeepMind over Dota 2 or any of the other options in this class of game. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.02682.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.02682.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.09467.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.09467.pdf [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.12266.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.12266.pdf [4] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/SSCAIT https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/SSCAIT

Mirioron 7y ago

What makes this amazing isn't specific to StarCraft 2. AI in strategy games has been really lackluster. I can't think of a single example of a strategy game where an AI was competitive against experienced players due to strategy and tactics, rather than inhuman speed, accuracy or cheating. So it's not just about AI in StarCraft 2, but rather AI in essentially any (strategy) game. Now we have an example of an AI that can compete with real players.

skybrian 7y ago
There is a genuine advance here, but keep in mind that when an AI is developed by the game developers, they're not necessarily playing to win, but to make the AI fun to beat, and without using too much computer power, which would make the game slower. Also, due to commercial pressures it's tough to put a lot of effort into the AI for a game that's still being changed to make it more fun. Even now, I wouldn't really expect to see most game developers start using the latest machine learning techniques to build their own AI's. Maybe the really successful games with competitive leagues might be interested?
- Mirioron 7y ago
  >There is a genuine advance here, but keep in mind that when an AI is developed by the game developers, they're not necessarily playing to win, but to make the AI fun to beat, and without using too much computer power, which would make the game slower. This point is being brought up a lot, but I don't really buy it. Yes, there have been instances where the AI being too good discouraged players from playing the game as much, but this almost always happens due to the AI having some inhuman advantage that a person could not really replicate. I think players do want the AI to pose a challenge - that's what a lot of casual PvP games are about. Humans are (were?) the only ones that could offer a fair match against another human. I will absolutely grant you the computational power point though. However, as hardware advances, this cost will become more and more acceptable. I don't expect to see widedspread adoption of this in commercial games within a decade, but I think that in 2 or 3 decades this will be the norm. In fact, I would bet that once we can make an AI that is good at a game, we can also make it weaker. A game could estimate a player's skill rating silently and then adjust the AI's strength to give the player a difficult/fun time. Of course, it could just be that AlphaStar is able to play well against humans, because players treat it like a human. Maybe the AI still has standard game AI-like weaknesses that can be exploited if people know that they're playing against an AI. Eg some Diamond league player went mass ravens and kicked AlphaStar's ass. The AI would have to learn how to deal with stuff like this on the fly and I don't think we're there yet.